Monkeys Fighting Robots: Kieron, a 2009 survey found that the Bourbon biscuit was the fifth most popular biscuit in the UK to dunk into tea. Where does it rank on your list?

KIERON GILLEN: Relatively low for me, actually. As a child, a custard cream tops it, and a Jammie Dodger reigns supreme over them all. As an adult, the humble Digestive is a beast, and an easy way to see how flush I am feeling is whether I buy a Chocolate HobNobs or plain hobnobs.

The Wicked + the Divine was always about a monument to everything I've ever loved, which we proceeded to set fire to. It was always meant to end up with me kneeling in the ashes, looking around and whispering "What Next?" I knew I never wanted to do anything like WicDiv ever again.

I wanted to write something starring adults, ideally people at least as old as I am. I wanted to write something with more emotions nearer the surface. I wanted to write something sadder, believe it or not. I wanted to write something that was clearly by me, and a continuation of my obsessions, but touching on stuff I've never written before.

Die was my answer.

"Goth Jumanji" is my jokey description of the book, which entirely doesn't give you the tone. Your references aren't innaccurate. As you note, the Return To Narnia aspect of the book is right there. It's forty-year olds dealing with the fantasy world they thought they escaped back as teenagers. It's that midlife crisis "have I wasted my life?" kinda vibe, comparing your teenage fantasies with where they've ended up.

It's a book with drama at the core, with six defined characters with their own compelling issues. Its mood leans dark fantasy to horror – I suspect my idea of dark fantasy reads as horror to most people. It's heavily autobiographical, drawing on my own love of role-playing games and a whole mass of insecurities. It doesn't skimp on the genre thrills, but it's not what the book is about, and not why you'll be coming back every month.

It's also a lot. It's very much the sort of book I can only do at Image, which tries to do everything. As well as this personal story around the cast, the whole thing basically is a Planetary-but-for-Fantasy-and-RPG deconstruction of the various elements that gave birth to the modern conception of games and fantasy. And as well as that, it's also an entirely coherent, and hopefully enchanting fantasy world summoned by Stephanie. It's a lot.

It doesn't aim low.

Hans: There’s a lot of influence from music, from movies, from video games. I was a real geek. There was no word for geeks at that moment, but I was a geek – I think for my 14th birthday, I asked my mother for the whole collection of Stephen King books. And my brother had this big collection of pulp books with those very, very kitschy covers. And all this is implied in the design for the comic.   Some of it comes from places that I had totally forgotten. Like when I was an art student in high school, my friends were all metalheads, and they had these art boards with lots of Van Halen stickers on them. And this really comes into the design of the world as well. 

Gillen: Also, for the characters, a lot of – how to phrase this? With Jamie [McKelvie], a lot of it is, I do all the work on my end – as in the original world-building, lots of stuff like that – and then I take it to Jamie, and he can interpret it. Jamie works out how to execute it; he’s the director, the casting director, the set dresser, all those things. With Stephanie, I give her as much as I normally do, and then she gives everything back. It’s like collaborating with the ocean.   One of the characters is this sensitive metalhead. When she mentioned that at first, I was like, “Oh, that’s really interesting,” because I would never have made him a metalhead. I was a metalhead, but I thought that would be too close to me. But then Stephanie pointed out how metalheads in pop culture are always like Bill and Ted or Wayne’s World. And I’ve known those metalheads, I love those characters, but the sensitive, art school metalhead – I’ve known that guy, too. There’s so much stuff like that [in working with Stephanie].